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Category Archives: orioles

These are the names that are freaking me out,
Verlander, Scherzer, and Price,
Plaguing my Oriole fandom with doubt,
Verlander, Scherzer and Price.
A trio of felines, bringing the heat,
Verlander, Scherzer, and Price,
Are these guys that a team writing “Ryan Flaherty” and “Jonathan Schoop” on the lineup card every day actually has a chance to beat??
Verlander, Scherzer, and Price.

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CJ, AB and I spent Memorial Day at Miller Park, watching the Orioles outlast the Brewers 7-6 in an exciting 10-inning contest; it was Baltimore’s first visit to Milwaukee since 2008, which CJ and I also attended. Some details (CJ is helping me write this):

Lots of production from the bottom of the Brewers order, including back-to-back homers by Khris Davis and Lyle Overbay. At that point Chris Tillman looked so overmatched that Kyle Lohse, in his last AB of the day, was apparently given permission to swing for the fences and hope for the best. (He struck out.)

There’s nothing like watching AL pitchers try to bat. Tillman made three tries at making contact on a bunt attempt, missed all three, and walked back to the dugout looking glum.

As an Oriole, Mark Reynolds was the worst third baseman I’ve ever seen, but somebody on Milwaukee’s staff has turned him around; he’s been notably good in both games we’ve seen this year, today making a diving stop and then firing a perfect throw to first from his knees.

Play of the game: bottom of the ninth, Brewers with runners on second and third with one out, Reynolds up. Ron Roenicke calls the “contact play” — pinch runner Elian Herrera takes off from third on contact, the idea being that he can probably score even on a soft groundout. Unfortunately for Milwaukee, Reynolds hit a hard line shot directly to J.J. Hardy, who caught it and nonchalantly flipped to Manny Machado for the double play before Herrera even realized he wasn’t about to score the game-winning run.

Barbecue brisket sandwich from the Smokehouse unexpectedly good. CJ ate four pieces of pizza. Correction, CJ wishes me to say he “devoured” four pieces of pizza. AB ate a hotdog.

I never get tired of watching Darren O’Day and his weirdo delivery. He’s now been an extremely good pitcher for two full years and 2014 so far, and I don’t think people outside Baltimore have heard of him yet.

Here’s my Brewer-loving friend Laura Hemming, right before Roenicke called the contact play:

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Tommy Hunter is on the DL and it’s made me a calmer person. He’s been lousy this year, and not just when he blows a save, which he’s done four times; he’s been pretty terrible in the games he does save, seemingly always letting guys on and coming within a hair of blowing the game. My heart can’t take much more. Is it just my imagination? Or does Tommy Hunter really have more near-misses than other pitchers? Well, here’s one thing you could check; if Hunter is constantly letting a few guys on but then buckling down and getting the big out when he needs it, you’d expect him to be a much better pitcher with runners in scoring position than he is in general. (In general, batters gain about 10 points of OPS when batting with RISP.) Here’s where baseball-reference’s amazing Play Index comes in. You can rank all pitchers in MLB history by “OPS against with runners in scoring position – OPS against overall.” You can restrict to people who’ve faced at least 400 batters with RISP in order to get rid of small samples. And you know who baseball’s all-time leader is in this stat? Yep — Tommy Hunter. Here’s the top 21.

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Calvin Pickering was a big strong guy who came up with the Orioles and hit the ball really, really hard whenever he hit it, which unfortunately was not often enough for him to hold down a steady job in the major leagues. CJ and I saw him a few years ago in Tucson, where he was playing for the visiting Calgary team from an unaffiliated league I think no longer exists. Here’s an e-mail interview with Pickering, featuring this great reminiscence:

Who was the toughest pitcher that you ever faced?: PEDRO MARTINEZ MOST DEFINITELY. I remember when we was playing them in Boston and they told me that I was in the lineup and Pedro was pitching. I was like cool so the first AB I think I walk then the second AB I hit a home run off him but the funny part about that AB is that he threw all fastball and I hit a home run so the 3 AB he threw me all CHANGEUPS and I flew out so when I was heading back to the dugout he told he pick you showed me that you can hit my fastball so I wanted to see if you could of hit my change up… I just started laughing on the way back in … ever since that day we been cool.

Pickering is the kind of player who’d probably get a longer look in 2013 than he did when he played. Terrible batting average, but walked so much that his OBP was a hundred points higher, and he had the power.

“He wasn’t bitter about baseball. He wasn’t angry that it didn’t work out. He had a dream to play major-league baseball, and he got his chance. He did his best. He was disappointed, yes, but he was very happy becoming a husband, a father and then a grandfather.”

Lagette paused to compose herself and continued, “Family was his life, and there were grandkids crawling all over him the evening before he died, holding his hand, saying, ‘Papa, look at this.’ He was a man of very simple wants and needs, and he died with a smile, and at peace with who he is.”

It also answers the question of how Hazewood got his name:

After giving birth to the second-youngest of 10 children, Catherine Hazewood left it up to the baby’s siblings to name him. The winner of a foot race to the hospital would get to name the baby. Aubrey won, naming his baby brother after a friend’s last name.

RIP.

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I took CJ to this game, his first at OPACY. Great day out, perfect weather, but a terrible game, which both teams seemed to be trying their best to lose. Joe Mauer dropped a foul popup. Alexi Casilla made the last out for the Orioles on a weak grounder — but the pitcher bobbled it, and Casilla probably would have made first on the play if he hadn’t jogged half-heartedly out of the batter’s box. And of course there was Adam Jones, who pulled up on a fly that was his to catch and let it drop three feet in front of him for a two-run double — yes, it was ruled a double, in an act of generosity so extravagant that the official scorer could have legally taken it off his taxes. A week later, Jones would drop a fly ball against the Yankees to allow three runs to score in a 5-2 New York victory. Jones looks like a really good center fielder, but the defensive metrics hate him, and I have to say the defensive metrics have the better of it at the moment.

Jason Hammel, in theory our ace, looked a lot worse than his line suggests; behind in the count all day, never seeming to find much of a rhythm.

So the Orioles, on the strength of this game, didn’t look like a good ballclub — but for the season as a whole, they’re holding their own against the powers of the AL East, and one can’t ask for much more than that.

After the game, CJ and I walked around the Inner Harbor, which has not changed at all since I was a kid, and seems to be just as crowded as popular and kid-pleasing as it ever has been. OK, one change: the Power Plant, which used to be a metal-oriented rock club, is now a Barnes and Noble. Sort of strange, since metal is more popular and than it was when I was a kid, and books less so. But Baltimore marches to its own beat.

Final note to self: remember that, even in Baltimore, a crabcake is not the kind of food that’s likely to be good at the ballpark.

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And here we go! The 2013 Orioles — now thickly coated with playoff experience — enter the 2013 season, as usual, picked by everyone to finish last. What’s not usual is that they’re not predicted to be terrible; there are no bad teams in the AL East, and it’s not out of the question that all five teams could finish with winning records.

The most popular Monte Carlo season simulators (CAIRO, Marcel, ZiPS, etc.) tend to have Baltimore winning around 79 games, and everybody else over .500. They give the Orioles an 8-10% chance of winning the division.

Is that right? The Orioles, of course, won 93 games last year and finished just two games behind New York, eventually winning the AL wildcard after a play-in game against the Rangers. Much has been made of the Orioles’s insanely (and unsustainably) good record of 29-9 in one-run games. The Orioles only scored a few more runs than they allowed last year; on the merits, they looked more like a .500 team than a contender.

On the other hand, the second-half team was very different from the team that opened the 2012 season. That team, with Manny Machado, Miguel Gonzalez, and Chris Tillman playing key roles, outscored its opponents 361-318. And that team, more or less, is the one that’s taking the field Tuesday against the Rays.

I think it’s fair to say that the 2013 Orioles have at least as much talent as the winning team that played the second half of 2012.

But here are some reasons for pessimism.

Jason Hammel, Wei-Yin Chen, and Miguel Gonzalez all pitched better than they were supposed to last season. If all three regress, the starting pitching gets notably worse.

Hammel and Markakis both missed some time with injury, but the Orioles’ other main contributors (Jones, Wieters, Davis, Chen, Hardy if you believe in b-refs defensive WAR) played just about full seasons. There’s no reason to expect the front-of-the-line players to be this healthy again, and the Orioles bench (especially without Betemit) is catastrophically weak. Anything goes wrong, anything, and Ryan Flaherty is going to get serious at-bats. I like Ryan Flaherty and his big narrow Nomar face but if you’re counting on his bat in a big spot you know things have gone floppy.

Biggest reason: the Red Sox and the Blue Jays got better. A lot better. The projection systems have each team improving 10-15 games, i.e. winning 10-20% more games than last year. The Orioles play 36 games against those two teams — so if they win 10-20% more of the games they play against us, that gives Baltimore 5 or so fewer wins, even if the team’s talent level is exactly the same. This is the biggest reason I think the Orioles will struggle to make it to .500 this year.

But let’s finish with optimism. The main contributors for Baltimore are all entering what ought to be their prime, and there’s every reason to think that most of them will get better. The Orioles may still be in the playoff chase in September when Bundy and/or Gausman show up, and they may not, but I take it to be almost certain that the 2013 Orioles will be a highly enjoyable team to watch and root for. Especially if Adam Jones keeps hitting people in the face with pies. I never get tired of the pies.

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Remember yesterday, when I was talking about the inglorious end of the Orioles 1997 season, when I reflected that sometimes the best team in the league faces a win-or-go-home playoff game, and they’ve got a legitimate ace on the mound who pitches a brilliant game, and yet … they lose?

Well, it happened to the Rangers last night. I’ve never watched Yu Darvish before, but jeez. A couple of times I was pretty sure I actually heard the baseball utter the word “Psych!” as it jerked away from an Oriole’s helpless swing.

Anyway: the Orioles move on to the ALDS against the Yankees. New York’s “playoff experience” will no doubt be made much of. Here’s the number of career playoff games, prior to last night, for the O’s postseason lineup:

Nate McLouth 3

J.J. Hardy 7

Chris Davis 0

Adam Jones 0

Matt Wieters 0

Jim Thome 67

Mark Reynolds 7

Ryan Flaherty 0

Manny Machado 0

They haven’t been there before. Will it hurt them? It didn’t keep the Orioles from beating Darvish, and I don’t think it’ll keep them from beating the Yankees, either.

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I don’t know if it’s much remembered outside Baltimore, but it was a brutal heartbreaker. Mike Mussina was brilliant, pitching 8 shutout innings and allowing only a single hit; but the Orioles hitters couldn’t come through when it counted, stranding 14 runners over the course of the game. Tony Fernandez finally won it for the Indians, 1-0, with a homer off Armando Benitez in the 11th, only the third Cleveland hit of the game.

Jim Thome, tonight’s DH for the Orioles, started in that game too, on the other side. Since then, Thome’s played in 39 playoff games, while the Orioles have played in none.

The Rangers are the best team in the American League, playing at home, with a legitimate ace starting the game.

But the unnervingly good rookie gave way to the regular closer, Chris Davis singled in two runs, and the Orioles sent it to extras. A lot of extras. Teagarden’s RBI single came in the top of the 18th, a little before 3 in the morning Wisconsin time. Reynolds knocked in an insurance run and the Orioles end up winning 4-2 to move percentage points behind the NYY for the divisional lead. It was the longest game the Orioles have played this year, and their 14th straight extra-inning win, the second-longest such streak in the history of baseball. (The otherwise unheralded 1949 Cleveland Indians hold the record.)

I have always been told that it’s good luck when a bird craps on your head, and perhaps this is so, because eventual winner Tommy Hunter pitched his whole outing with an avian dollop on his cap last night.

Steve Johnson pitched 3 scoreless innings with 1 hit and 4 K. His ERA stands at 2.13. What does a guy have to do to get a spot start on this team?

And it just got yet more crowded; thanks to the depleted bullpen from last night’s game, the Orioles have called up 19-year-old superprospect Dylan Bundy. Sounds like he’ll be used in relief, maybe even as early as today — in which case, happy Bundyday!

Dave Cameron claims that, for some teams, the best strategy in a one-game playoff is to skip the starter, instead deploying your best relievers for two or three innings each. He’s writing about the Braves, but could this be a good move for the Orioles? Two innings each from Steve Johnson, Pedro Strop, Darren O’Day, and Luis Ayala, with Jim Johnson closing it out, sounds like a pretty good starter to me.